How Reality Television Shapes Travel

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Last fall, the New Jersey Defamation League that’s driving much
of recent cable television sent several of its members on a
mission overseas. When The Real Housewives of New Jersey
began a two-episode trip to sunny Punta Cana, its Soprano-manqué
cast hit the Dominican Republic running. First, airport personnel
came scurrying to remove housewife Jacqueline Laurita, teetering
on high heels after an in-flight happy hour, from a baggage
carousel she had mounted to search for a loudly lamented “one
missing luggage.” Then, for the short trip to the Hard Rock Hotel
& Casino Punta Cana, the crew took a narco-cartel fleet of
huge black SUV’s—their convoy abruptly halted when Joe “Juicy”
Giudice interrupted a driver, saying, “Hey, amigo.... I gotta
take a pee-pee.” Stepping into the tropic sun, the squat
fortysomething was soon joined by paisanos from other cars, who
stood roadside giving the Caribbean nation a beer-fueled Jersey
baptism that set the tone for the rest of their trip—which
included a lawsuit-bringing brawl with other Hard Rock patrons.
How, then, did the show’s roughly 2.8 million viewers respond to
this Bay of Pigs in Punta Cana? Not with “Ew” or “The humanity!”
but, “OMG, I’m so going there for the holidays!”

Just after the Dominican Republic–set Housewives
episodes aired, the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Punta Cana
recorded a 300 percent spike in Web traffic. “We’re a massive
hotel with 1,787 rooms,” says the hotel’s press representative,
Kelli Schindelegger. “But with the exposure from the show, we
sold out for New Year’s. People who watch Housewives are
also attracted to the hotel lifestyle, so it was a huge appeal to
that demographic.” It’s a demographic now changing the style and
practice of American tourism around the world.

Fifty years ago, the media’s archetypal American abroad—say, a
fedora-topped Jimmy Stewart squiring Doris Day through
Marrakesh—inspired adventurous viewers to go and see Morocco for
themselves. In this, they were much like the 19th-century English
tourists who visited the sites of Brontë novels—distant
precursors of the newer, stranger breed that scholars call “media
tourists.” Instead of sweeping postwar cinema, these tourists
grew up with a somewhat downgraded, television-sized exotica: a
tropical paradise whose new visitors arrived each week to send
wee, white-suited Hervé Villechaize scurrying up a tower to ring
a bell, crying, “De plane! De plane!” Thirty years later, this
formative fantasy met the unmooring force of reality television,
whose recent “docusoaps” seduce viewers not only with foreign
landscapes but, sometimes perversely, with the lifestyles
reality-television stars impose upon the world.

MTV’s The Real World began the paradigm shift just after
its 1992 debut, setting each subsequent season in a new city
announced in the title. But it wasn’t until Richard Hatch strode
flabbily, hirsutely naked along Malaysia’s Pulau Tiga beach, in
2000’s surprise smash Survivor, that media tourism truly
exploded. Since then, producers have sought exotic backdrops for
their shows and their sometimes-not-so-telegenic stars, though in
the past few years, this hired scenery began grabbing the
starring role. Sites in South Africa, Tahiti, New Zealand, and
even New Guinea have reported huge surges in tourists from the
United States after visits by reality-television shows, some
almost literally putting these destinations onto the map of
America’s consciousness.

Cable television’s positive effect on Americans’ global literacy
has been notable ever since the Travel Channel’s 2005 premiere of
Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, whose host’s gonzo
style of cultural immersion has debunked negative stereotypes
around the world while introducing viewers to everything from
Singaporean street food to the delicacy of Namibian warthog
rectum. Even the channel’s most sensational programs arguably
have credible cultural merit. “Shows like Got Home Alive
may not make our viewers think, ‘Oh, let’s go to that country,’ ”
Travel Channel president Laureen Ong acknowledges. “But they may
educate them, teach them: ‘Here are things to avoid if we do
go.’”

But when it comes to educating viewers on behaviors to avoid, few
shows can match the three episodes of The Real Housewives of
New York City set in Morocco last spring. In one, socialite
Sonja Morgan stood in an all-white designer ensemble before a
senses-dazzling Marrakesh souk and declared her core existential
dilemma: “I’m torn between shopping and being secure.” The rest
of the ladies ate, preyed, and shoved their way valiantly through
like Elizabeth Gilbert’s evil siblings, their local impact
graciously absorbed by a long-suffering (and, one hopes,
well-compensated) guide, whose djellaba and dark shades revealed
only a smile as enigmatic as the Sphinx.

Perhaps anticipating such scenes, Florence’s city officials used
legal tactics to contain the cast of MTV’s Jersey Shore
when it arrived in the city last summer. Banning MTV from
shooting at Boboli Gardens or the Uffizi Gallery averted the
inevitable atrocity of the Situation’s abs-off with the
David, though it didn’t stop his fans’ pilgrimages to
the pizza parlor where he worked.

Whatever their educational value, the housewives and Jersey mooks
do fill the screen with sound and color, which can’t be said of
Brad Womack, the putative star of last year’s The
Bachelor, which concluded in South Africa. The 39-year-old
bluffly handsome bar owner actually seemed hard-pressed to occupy
three dimensions. In the voice-over opening of his South African
adventure—spoken in the careful Texan cadences of a teen lineman
on Friday Night Lights—Womack made it clear that as a
travelographer, he’s no Paul Theroux: “South Africa is…amazingly
beautiful. It’s a very vast land full of exotic animals. It’s
really, really cool.” Later, on a safari, when a lion
appropriately yawned at him, Womack deemed this, “Seriously, the
coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

But in this case, South Africa spoke for itself. The days
following the airing of The Bachelor were the busiest
ever on the southafrica.net tourism website—surpassing
even the two weeks of the World Cup, according to South
African Tourism. The show’s climactic “rose ceremony,” in
which Womack proposed to the final, lucky lady, took place at
the Tinga Legends Lodge, on the Lion Sands Private Game
Reserve. The South Africa tourism website offered
Bachelor-themed packages, and within two weeks more
than 200 people had booked trips to stay at Lion Sands,
according to Robert More, Tinga’s co-owner. While the figure
may not sound significant, a package that costs thousands per
person and requires a flight halfway around the world operates
on a different scale.

It seems that no recent reality-television shows have motivated
American travelers more than The Bachelor and The
Bachelorette, which have consistently brought the largest
spikes in U.S. tourism. “The Bachelorette is practically
a travelogue,” says Kim S. Marshall, publicist for the Hilton
Bora Bora Nui Resort & Spa, whose occupancy jumped 55 percent
after hosting the show in 2010. “There are cut-ins from the
commercials to sweeping aerial views of the destination.” She
reports that visitorship to Tahiti, which had flatlined for
almost a decade, shot up 37 percent after the show. A year after
hosting The Bachelorette, the Hilton Bora Bora Nui also
welcomed the cast of Keeping Up with the Kardashians,
which brings incomparable ancillary benefits in publicity. “If
you host the Kardashians at your hotel, you know it’s going to be
in Us Weekly and People every week,” Marshall
says.

Yet reality television’s amateur romantics may be a stronger
brand than Kim and Kris, who went from their Bora-Bora idyll to a
lavish wedding and a marriage that lasted less than half a
television season. “I’m not a big television person,” says
Adeline Regan, a 26-year-old Long Island accountant raised in the
reality-television age. Still, she hasn’t missed a season of
The Bachelor or The Bachelorette in four years,
the last of which was most fateful. “Before that, I didn’t really
know anything about the French Polynesian islands,” Regan says.
“But seeing how beautiful it was and knowing the producers picked
this location out of any struck me.”

With teams using more than 100 unique apparatuses to launch globular projectiles a half-mile or more, the 27th annual World Championship Punkin Chunkin event is our pick as November’s Weird Festival of the Month.

Regan and her fiancé were engaged last August, will wed this
August, and have placed a deposit for a honeymoon at the Hilton
Bora Bora Nui. There she’ll join the thousands of others like
her: viewers who see a television landscape populated by people
whose tans are fake, whose lives are scripted, and whose
relationships end before the airdate—and who still fall in love
and book their flights. “With the world today, I really need
things that are positive in my life,” Regan says, to explain her
viewing habits. “Sometimes, I just really need a love story.”

Kim Kardashian Takes Tahiti: The Kardashians
(and their television crew) can be demanding on their hosts,
according to officials at the Hilton Bora Bora Nui—but they
deliver serious publicity in return.

The Bachelor Romances South Africa:
Although Brad Womack’s engagement went south shortly after the
show aired, viewers still booked tens of thousands of dollars’
worth of copycat trips.

Jersey Shore Does Florence: Perhaps
wary of reality television after their own brush with the
all-too-real Berlusconi show, Florence officials banned MV from
filming in high-profile locations such as the Uffizi Gallery.

Jersey ShoreDestination: Florence
Tourism Bump: minor

Keeping Up with the KardashiansDestination: Bora-Bora
Tourism Bump: respectable